Opposition to vaccines is not a new phenomenon, but positions once associated with traditional religious or conservative stances have given way to some highly disparate views that transcend traditional left/right/religious divisions. This article reviews recent literature showing how social media has contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories around Covid‐19 and mass vaccination programmes. The narratives discussed are principally those of the right and the religious right.

Libertarian ideas of self‐ownership and the priority of bodily autonomy have featured prominently in the political debate over vaccination programmes and the justifiability or otherwise of restricting the liberty of the unvaccinated. In this article we look at a selection of recent right‐libertarian literature to show that there is a considerable divergence between the application of consistent libertarian principles to this issue by academic libertarians and the strident opposition to vaccination programmes and vaccine mandates expressed by people who profess to be libertarians in the public‐political debate.

One of the most distinctive and startling claims of Rawlsian political liberalism is that truth has no place in public political deliberation on matters of basic justice. Joshua Cohen thinks there is a tension between Rawls's exclusion of truth in public political deliberation and the importance accorded to truth in the conception of morally serious political deliberation held by most citizens. Cohen claims that this apparent tension can be resolved by constructing and introducing a suitably political, non-divisive and neutral, conception of truth which is capable of satisfying both the highly distinctive requirements of Rawlsian political liberalism and the importance accorded to truth by the conception of public deliberation held by most citizens. In this paper I argue that Cohen is unsuccessful in this attempt and that his political conception of truth cannot satisfy both political liberalism and a descriptively adequate specification of the importance accorded to truth by the familiar accounts of morally serious political deliberation upon which Cohen relies.

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